The criticisms are a kind of conservative
twofer, allowing them to hit old targets like NPR
and The New York Times by
raising questions about their objectivity, while at the same time undermining
the grass-roots claims of the new protest movement by suggesting it has
professional help — or at least professional cheerleaders.

So far, both the Times and NPR have had to
distance themselves from freelancers accused of getting too close to the
protests, while MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan has come under scrutiny for
leaked emails purportedly showing that he had helped the protesters shape
their message.

Behind much of the criticism has been Andrew Breitbart, the
conservative media provocateur whose sites have published both the leaked
emails and Monday’s video of a New York Times freelancer speaking about
the protests on a panel. But his critiques have been amplified by
conservative talkers such as Rush Limbaugh, who last week held up the leaked
emails of Ratigan and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi as evidence that
Occupy Wall Street was a “construct of the media Democrat industrial
complex.”

Taken together, these critiques may just muddy
the waters enough to do some damage to both the media and the fledgling
anti-Wall Street movement. But when the case is examined in isolation,
it’s hard to find much of a smoking gun, though that that hasn’t
stopped media organizations from reacting defensively to the charges leveled
at them.

“The problem is the Times pretends to be
objective,” said Lee Stranahan, the writer and filmmaker who posted the
video of the Times
freelancer on Big Government, Breitbart’s website. “It’s
very similar to the NPR thing. I listen to NPR and like it, but I wish
they’d drop the public funding because it makes them scurry like rats
at the slightest suggestion that they might be biased.”

Stranahan sparked the latest bit of scurrying
on Monday after he posted a video of New York Times freelancer Natasha
Lennard, who formerly worked at POLITICO, discussing the protests somewhat
sympathetically as part of a panel.

Lennard played a pivotal role in the media
narrative of Occupy Wall Street, contributing reporting to the first New York
Times front-page story on the protests and chronicling her experiences
getting arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge while covering the protests on the
Times’s City Room blog.

Along with other critical posts on Big
Government such as “Glenn Beck was right: Says
Leading Occupy Activist: #Occupy Wall Street Wants Revolution,” and
“Timothy McVeigh Smiling Up at #OccupyWall St Protestors,”
Stranahan described how Lennard was shown “participating as a featured
speaker in a discussion among anarchists, communists and other radicals as
they examine the theory, strategy and tactics of the Occupy protests.”

He was referring to an Oct. 14 panel
discussion about Occupy Wall Street at Bluestockings bookstore organized by
Jacobin magazine at which Lennard spoke about the tendency of self-censorship
she had noticed at the protests.

“So there is a silencing that’s
sort of gone on without much addressing, because to address it would be to
out oneself. So if you’re talking — and this also addresses the
question of escalation; it’s like — yes, there are a lot of
people talking about many different ideas. Do they all want all of those
ideas live-streamed to the entire world on the assumption that everything is
permitted and legal, when it quite clearly isn’t?” she said

Stranahan argued that these and other
statements are evidence that she is “not merely covering the protests
but is apparently also taking part in and executing them.”

Lennard rejected the notion
that she was aligned with the movement, writing in an email to POLITICO that
“when I say ‘we’ I mean those watching what’s going
on and commenting on what seems effective, problematic, interesting (the
point of the debate).”

The Times reviewed the video, as well as her
previous reporting and saw nothing amiss in what she’d filed — but
said it wasn’t planning to put her on the beat again.

“This freelancer, Natasha Lennard, has
not been involved in our coverage of Occupy Wall Street in recent days, and
we have no plans to use her for future coverage,” said Times
spokeswoman Eileen Murphy in a statement. “We have reviewed the past
stories to which she contributed and have not found any reasons for concern
over that reporting.”

She added that, “All our journalists,
staff or freelance, are expected to adhere to our ethical rules and journalistic
standards and to avoid doing anything that could call into question the
impartiality of their work for the Times.”

The question of a news organization’s
ethical standards also featured prominently in the dust-up over Lisa Simeone,
the host of two public radio arts shows, who was fired from one and had the
other dropped by NPR after Roll Call revealed
— and the Daily Caller amplified — that she was working as a
spokeswoman for October 2011, one of the Occupy D.C. organizations assembled
at Freedom Plaza, a block from the White House.

Simeone’s case is complicated by
the fact that she’s a freelance arts journalist who worked for two
shows, “Soundprint” and “World of Opera,” that were
not produced by NPR, though “World of Opera” was distributed by
it. But because NPR has been such a lightning rod for political criticism,
even a whiff of association was too much. The organization that produces
“Soundprint” fired her based on NPR’s ethics code,
according to the Baltimore
Sun.

“I admire Simeone for her commitment and
her willingness to put her salary and career on the line for what she
believes,” wrote the Sun’s
David Zurawik. “But, on the other hand, NPR had to do exactly what it
did if it wanted to have an ethics code it could enforce.”

The cases of Ratigan and Taibbi, two outspoken
liberals, are even harder to pin down when it comes to journalistic ethics.

According to emails on a private listserv
leaked to Big Government, Ratigan at one point advised the Occupy Wall Street
protesters on their message.

“The focus on simple shared principle
and intent to align with all who agree with that principle is a unique
strength,” Ratigan wrote. Another email hashes out a rough draft of a
press statement, saying, “Here it is w/Dylan’s suggested
revisions.”

Taibbi’s leaked email shows, in essence,
a boiled down version of his article, “My
Advice to the Wall Street Protesters.”

Neither is particularly surprising,
considering that Ratigan has been enthusiastically covering the protests for
weeks and Taibbi published a version of his email in Rolling Stone.

MSNBC has embraced Occupy Wall Street in a way
that echoes the way Fox News embraced the early tea party protests, with
everyone from Tamron Hall to Ed Schultz anchoring from ZuccottiPark
as the protests gained steam. But considering that MSNBC suspended Keith
Olbermann for his equally un-shocking donations to Democratic candidates,
because of NBC News’s one-size-fits-all ethics policy, it does raise
questions about where MSNBC draws the line between opinionated journalist and
activist.

An MSNBC spokesman could not be reached for
comment Monday night.

Taibbi noted that the criticisms of him only
came after politicians, including the president and Mitt Romney, began to
shift their rhetoric to be more accepting of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

“The reality, of course, is that people
like Rush, Romney and Obama are all becoming cognizant of the deep
frustrations that exist across the political spectrum and are growing
desperate to prevent the powder keg from blowing completely — hence,
the intense effort to describe OWS as a top-down manipulation,” he
wrote. “Of course, the notion that this is all a media fabrication is
ludicrous.”